


Instar

by spiderstanspiderstan



Series: Lycosidae [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Mentorship, Peter is really smart but he doesn't understand self-preservation at all, Sociopolitical tantruming, concrit wanted, spiderbros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-06
Updated: 2016-12-06
Packaged: 2018-09-06 19:43:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8766472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiderstanspiderstan/pseuds/spiderstanspiderstan
Summary: Natasha investigates Tony's newest ally. He may have potential, but they definitely don't make them like they used to.





	

By many standards, including her own, Natasha was overreacting.

Tony Stark’s allies were Tony Stark’s business, but he knew she had a habit of snooping. And he knew how she’d react in a situation like this. It’d been frighteningly easy to dig up information on the new boy and cross-reference from there. Anyone could have done it.

Fifteen years, five months. Born in the new millennium.

It left a horrible taste in her mouth.

Certain people in her life would have called it paranoia. This was a stunningly unprofessional course of action, but professionalism had gone out the window when Captain America and Iron Man had started bickering like toddlers.

The sun was out in full, pre-summer force, excusing her a set of sunglasses. She’d picked a good day to do this. She wasn’t one for side projects, but some things were personal.

He wouldn’t be the first, if she was right.

Natasha had learnt very early on that no amount of information technology could stop people from hiding things, and no amount of failures would stop people from trying. Whenever the infrastructure was present, similar cases sprung up.

The necessary genetic mangling wasn’t pretty in the best of cases, but starting either in early childhood or post-puberty made it a lot easier. If he was as new to his abilities as his fighting style made him look, he’d be something of an outlier. Maybe a trial run- Black Widow trainees had started out older until the process was tweaked to avoid breaking them completely. The serum used on Steve would have killed a child.

The bell rang, and a torrent of teenagers flooded through the gates. Spider-Man stood out, alone in the crowd of cliques. He had a handful of regular contacts, but apparently they had better plans.

He’d been steadily overachieving until about eight months ago, either when his career had started affecting his grades, or when he’d started actually being there to get them.

Natasha had never been an academic. She’d made more sense as an athlete, or someone pretty and vapid and playing to stereotypes. By the time she was negotiating her image in such detail, she’d aged in to bigger things.

She cupped her hands around her mouth and called Peter’s name.

He looked smaller in street clothes: jeans with the cuffs rolled for size rather than fashion, paired with a hoodie that swamped him. Worn-out shoes and a backpack, one earbud dangling through the collar of his hoodie, a tuft of brown hair fluffing out from under the hood. If she’d had to style him as _harmless,_ she would have ended up with a near-identical array.

“Follow me,” she told him. He hesitated briefly, but did so.

“I know- I know who you are,” he said, tucking his thumbs under his backpack straps and shifting the weight as they walked. “And I don’t trust you. You know that, right?”

“Good, you can recognise faces,” she answered. “I won’t tell. Do you want to go to a cafe or a diner?”

Confusion flashed across Spider-Man’s face.

“Uhhh…”  he said, startled. “Cafe?”

He followed her to her favourite such place without question. She’d chosen it for the unique decor, vegan options, and the fact that it was a complete and utter playground for her purposes. Nothing left the cramped front room, because it was lousy with sound-dampening materials and unspoken promises that gossipers would suffer. It was also completely empty when you booked it to be.  

Spider-Man hovered awkwardly by her side, looking unsure. She led the way to a corner booth, which was mostly just an assortment of pillows.

“I”m getting coffee, do you want anything?”

He allowed her to order his drink and bring it to the table, which either meant he was very trusting or very stupid. The two got hard to discern.

“So,” Natasha began. This was a conversation, not an interrogation.“Who trained you?”

He’d lie, most likely, but he probably wouldn’t be good at it. He didn’t seem to have much by way of subtlety. If someone had designed him, they’d put a lot of effort into brute force, and little else. Like Steve, without the vetting process.

It was a common mistake. People assumed boys could get by on strength alone.

“Nobody,” Spider-Man said, trying to scoop whipped cream off his abomination of a ‘coffee’ with the scalloped end of his straw. “I’m...self-taught. I have Tony Stark now, though, so I’m doing fine.”

Natasha  made a mental note of that. _Self-taught_. That explained a lot.

“Then where’d you get your powers?” she asked.

“Is this going to be a regular thing?” Spider-Man asked, abruptly uncomfortable. “Are ex-Avengers gonna keep showing up in my life and interrogating me? ‘Cause I need to start planning around that if you are. People knowing who I am could get me in a lot of trouble.”

“No,” Natasha said. “Call it curiosity.”

They’d been briefed and introduced on the way to Germany.  His suspicion was very much justified, and she was already surprised at how much she’d gotten away with.

“Chance.” It was a simple answer, and a fraudulent one. “Well, it could have happened to anyone, anyway.”

Superhuman powers and no training. Someone, somewhere had been very, very irresponsible.

“I didn’t ask how, I asked _where_ ,” Natasha explained. Usually she wouldn’t get anywhere, being so direct. The willingness to answer was...disquieting. “You’re clearly local, but if you’d been born with them you’d fight differently.”

Spider-Man was silent for a second, before locking her with pleading eyes.

“You have to promise you won’t tell anyone, okay?” he said. When Natasha nodded, he continued. “Interfering with science I shouldn’t have. On a school trip. Please don’t laugh.”  

The surge of relief Natasha felt was like breathing in after being held underwater.

 _He wasn’t lying._ Every element of his- genuinely messy, not coached to communicate anything- body language indicated it. There was nothing and nobody to blame. This boy was unique- a mistake _._

Thank God.

“Chance,” she said. She sipped her coffee. “And Tony still brought you to Germany?”

“He-” Spider-Man made a short, frustrated huffing sound. “Why _wouldn’t_ he have brought me? I’m qualified. Not like, _you_ qualified, but still qualified.”

Had Stark told him that?  If so, he’d been lying. Peter fought like an untrained child who happened to have access to super-strength and an extra axis of motion. Because that was what he was. If not for his enhancement, sloppy form alone would have killed him.

“Right,” she said, dryly. “Are you staying with him, then?”

At that, he perked up slightly, almost smug, the way smart men got when they’d been convinced they had found out something secret.

“You’re trying to convert me!” he accused. “I _knew_ this would happen. Tony warned me. I’m not switching sides.”

“I don’t want you to,” Natasha said. “I don’t care what you do from this point out.”

Any reasonable actor would take one look at him and tear him to shreds. The mask didn’t help- he couldn’t seem to keep his mouth shut, or coordinate his speech to any meaningful degree. His personality came through in everything from word choice to enunciation.

Which raised a question: what the hell had Tony been thinking?

The power set was convenient, but he’d have to be built from the ground up. She could understand the urge to circumvent standard ethics for the simple advantage of brute force, certainly, but there were massive tactical downsides to having him on your team. Someone who took _keep your distance_ to mean _fight the winter soldier hand-to-hand_ was a disadvantage, regardless of raw strength.

“Oh, that’s good, I guess. You guys are cool and all - _really_ cool- but you’re still wrong about...” Spider-Man vaguely waved his free hand, as if to indicate the entire debacle. “Stuff. A lot of stuff, really.”

His ease of obtainment. Of course.

It hadn’t occurred to her because she would have been much, much harder to obtain. At five, she had been less trusting than this idiot at fifteen. She’d heard his babbling over the coms. Just _being there_ had worked as an incentive, and the shower of technology probably hadn’t hurt, either.

“It’s fine,” she said. “We can agree to disagree. We’ve all got our own motives in this mess.”

Spider-Man was making a valiant attempt to stare at her without actually staring. His eyes flitted between her own, her hairline, and a spot on the wall a few inches to the right of her head, never dropping below the level of her nostrils.  

“That’s good, then,” he said, grinning around his straw, just that little bit starstruck. “I won’t tell. I’m pretty sure I’ll lose my lab privileges if I get caught having coffee with dissenters. Did you ever go in Tony’s labs? Y’know, before? To synthesise, like… assassin stuff? They’re _so cool_.”

He was vaguely reminiscent of Clint’s children. Oblivious and upbeat, because that was what kids were _like_ when allowed to run wild.

Trying to get logical thought from an underdeveloped brain was like staring at a lump of clay on a pottery wheel and hoping it spontaneously became a vase. There needed to be some sort of molding involved, and the moral way tended to be slower.

“Sorry,” he said, sinking back into the cushioned booth. “That’s probably secret. I’m kinda new to this whole... everything. Point is, Tony has cool labs. I’m probably not making sense. Sorry.”  

“You really like Tony, don’t you?” Her tone was distant and slightly fond, calculated to sound as if she thought the obsession was sweet, instead of massively exploitable.

“How could I not?” Spider-Man asked. His face lit up, and the idolatry kicked in full-force. “He’s _amazing._ He’s like- he’s what every single scientist in the world wants to be. It’s like- like, if I was an actor, right, and Leonardo DiCaprio  showed up at my house and was like, ‘Hey, wanna come be in my next movie?’. It was basically the best day of my life.”

“Captain America dropped a jetway on you, and it was the _best_ day of your life?”

“No, no, see- _you’re_ focusing on the jetway,” Spider-Man explained, gesturing to her with his drink. “ _I’m_ focusing on the Captain America. You- you gotta look at the _positives_ . Not that it was like, positive as a situation- it sucked. Everything’s going to hell in a hand-basket. But on the other hand, _Captain America_!”

How saccharine.

Their dissenting coffee date ended with an exchange of numbers and a phone call.                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

“I don’t know _what_ you think you’re doing,” Tony said, the second she picked up. “But- _don’t._ ”

“Don’t what?” Natasha asked, solely to irritate him.

“Oh, _I_ don’t know, show up out of nowhere and do nothing but bother _my_ protégé?” Tony said. “I know that things like empathy and international law don’t come easy to you, but seriously? Leave him alone.”

A project. Of course. Tony loved making things he could show off.

“You know why I’m interested, right?” she asked. “Most people hit the driving age before going up against Hydra-made supersoldiers. Outliers are interesting.” 

There was a moment of silence, then a sigh.

“That’s not what this _is,_ ” Tony said. “Look. I’m not trying to stop him. I can’t. He’s literally superhuman. But I can make what he’s doing even _less_ dangerous. I have the technology to do that and I’m sharing it. If he wants to help out, he can. Contrary to popular belief, I’m not a psychopath.”

Sometimes, she wondered how much better things could have gone if he’d developed a sense of responsibility before the age of thirty-eight.

“ _Wow_ .” She drew out the word. “How _noble_ of you, bubble-wrapping the child you brought into combat.”

The word, in this case, was shorthand for many things- unprepared, untrained, and uninformed, for a start. Natasha knew from experience that people were breakable, regardless of age, and the worst case scenario of tears and lifelong trauma could happen at any point, but she also knew how to appeal to taboos.

“I didn’t make him do this. I didn’t ‘bring’ him into anything.” Tony protested. “Germany was voluntary. ‘Picking up my slack’ or whatever the papers are calling it is _voluntary_. He's got great talent, and if _I_ want to help him develop that, that's between the two of us. You aren’t involved.”

Stark had always been possessive. She’d seen children throw similar tantrums, when they didn’t want to share their friends.

He’d sort of missed the boat on neuroplasticity, if ‘development’ was what he was going for. Teenagers took a special kind of artistry to mold because they struggled with authority by nature. Either he really liked the kid, or he was very desperate.   

“If I want to talk to him, that's between the two of _us,_ ” Natasha answered. “I'm not doing any harm. I'm not the one who bugged him.”

“The suit is bugged, not him. He's not supposed to take it everywhere,” Tony said, as if that excused it. “I had trackers on the whole team, just in case. You can't say you didn't know that.”

“Does he know?”

“He builds his fighting tech from scratch,” Tony said, irritated. “If he didn't want them there, they wouldn't be there. He’s not stupid.”

“UNICEF would have a field day with you.”

“Nat, honey, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean I’m wrong,” Tony said, faux-soothing. “Assuming that Spidey's dumb enough to be pressured into all of this is an insult to his character. He's not that easy to influence.”

“But you still won’t let him talk to strangers.” Isolation was an effective strategy, but probably not a deliberate one in this case. Stark wasn’t that cruel, not on purpose. Pressuring and persuasion were far more his style.

“He can do whatever he wants, I’m not his mom. I don’t _let_ him do anything, I just advise,” Tony said. “ _You’re_ the one who switched sides. This is a matter of basic security, because he has clearance to things you currently don’t, and you have a history of stopping at nothing to get information.”

“I have no interest in him _specifically_ ,” Natasha said. “You know exactly why I did this. Don’t pretend you don’t.”

There was a brief pause.

“And you think _I’m_ overprotective?” Tony said. “Natasha, I know the sources of my coffee beans, do you honestly think I wouldn’t do a background check?”

Either he’d rushed it within the idiotic time limit they’d had, or he’d been informed on Spider-Man for months without sharing that information with anyone.

“You don’t ask questions when you’re desperate,” Natasha said laconically.

When Tony Stark wanted, Tony Stark got, with a spectacular kind of single-minded focus that she’d never seen anywhere else. It was how he’d made the arc reactor. It was also how he’d made Ultron, admittedly with collaboration.

“Well I did _this time_ , okay?” Tony insisted. “He’s fine, the situation surrounding him is fine, and this is none of your business.”

“Prove to me that it isn’t.” Natasha was obstinate; allowing herself to be slightly petty.

Tony huffed at her, like a petulant teenager.

“Natasha, you are being frustratingly arbitrary here,” he said. “Would this even bother you if he was three years older?”

He ended the call on that note, and the argument with it.

Natasha gathered her things, and left the cafe.

A day later, she called Spider-Man.

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on my new fic tumblr [here!](http://na-no-why-mo.tumblr.com)


End file.
